Month: February 2008

Today the lab was alive with special visitors, an inpromptu Flash lesson (that ended with applause) and language consultancy students who tried their hand as explaining their line of work through video. We tried to use sketchcast, but as the tool is still fairly unreliable, some students chose other ways to express themselves. Similar to the ‘simplicity’ of Odeo, tools that are too ‘one-click’ can be more difficult to use than using several tools.

Below you will find a great sample from a group that chose to use still pictures rather than sketchcast.

This morning as I got ready for work, I listened to a NPR podcast about the YouTube as a treasure trove of classical music. Commentator Miles Hoffman discussed YouTube as a valuable asset to music students as it easily allows them to juxtapose and evaluate the same piece as performed by different artists or to learn technique by watching great artists who have passed. I had never thought of YouTube in this capacity, but I agree with his assessment, as well as his interest in the comments. Apparently, comments on classical music stick to describing the beauty, while comments on soprano singers tend to passionately argue for who was/is the ‘best’ singer.

The seminar will be live streamed and we will have a Skype channel open for distributed discussion. The links will be posted here.

This is from Ian’s website (a much better introduction than I would be able to produce):

Hi, I’m Ian Bogost. I am a videogame researcher, critic, and designer, as well as an author and an entrepreneur. I am a professor at Georgia Tech (a university), a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games (a videogame studio), and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).

In my academic life, I am Assistant Professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology, where I work in the School of Literature Communication and Culture. I am also affiliated faculty at the College of Computing’s GVU Center. At Georgia Tech, I teach in the undergraduate program in Computational Media and the graduate program in Digital Media.

My research focuses on videogames as cultural artifacts. In particular, I’m interested in a kind of game criticism that contextualizes games in the long history of human expression, and game rhetoric, or how games make arguments. These two subjects are the respective topics of my first two books, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, both from the MIT Press. Much of my work concerns the uses of videogames outside entertainment, including politics, advertising, learning, and art. But I’m also very interested in mainstream commercial videogames and historical approaches to videogames. I write frequently in the videogame trade press, and I also co-edit (with Gonzalo Frasca) Water Cooler Games, a popular website on videogames with an agenda.

More recently, I’ve been looking at on the way hardware and software platforms influence creative practice. Nick Montfort and I are co-editing a book series on this topic called Platform Studies, and we’re writing the first book in that series, about the Atari 2600. I’m fascinated to the point of obsession with the Atari, and I often use it in teaching and in my own artistic practice.

Tomorrow the lab will open again after the reconstruction work. It will take some time for everything to be in order again, but we will be up and running Monday morning as planned. The importance of the lab is obvious to us I guess, but I have really noticed how the absence of the lab has created a ‘void’.

When opening again we have some new colors, wallpaper and ventilation in the old lab, but also a totally new section. Among other things, the new section will host resources for a number of identified research and development areas: electronic literature, participatory media, digital art, digital cultural heritage and critical perspectives.There will also be a rather spectacular display and interaction set up there. All part of a creative and hopefully vibrant studio space.

This semester’s first HUMlab seminar will take place on Tuesday, Feb 5. Principal Ann-Charlotte Markman will talk about schools and interactive whiteboards (in Swedish) at 10.15. Title: “Att förändra skolan: Från kompost till digitala skrivtavlor“. One week later, Ian Bogost from Georgia Tech will visit HUMlab. His talk is titled “Platform Studies, Creative Computing and Constraint: the Atari VCS (1977) and beyond“. Feb 12 at 10.15. We are very happy about starting the new semester and new lab with such first-rate guests. Both talks will be live streamed and archived.